Up With the Tinderbox
by adangeli
Summary: If she starts cornering him into situations that make him prove how well he knows her, it's more tactical than accidental. A Fire Collection Story. Cover art by A Karswyll.


She thinks a lot about matches and the sound of the flick of a lighter across three lanes of pavement, two parking lots, and one long stretch of space that can't be crossed. His sharpness – his pain – were easy in those first moments when he was back and he couldn't tell the highway from a covert mission. He was churlish but open and she remembers with startling clarity the feel of his sand roughened fingers beneath her own in the one moment she really allowed herself to touch him.

The details of what happened between D.C. and Colorado Springs are probably somewhere between what he remembers and what she does, because he mentioned, in the mess over the coffee that masqueraded as her breakfast, the way she stole his sunglasses like a teenager. The way she remembers it, she'd let him open up the gears on her car before she slid the glasses off his face. Sam was never good at speaking teenager, but she's pretty good at metaphor and he either missed it or wants to pretend he did.

Jack O'Neill misses nothing. So if he wants to pretend her slipping off his mirrored sunglasses wasn't one step away from slipping her hand into his pants, fine. They're playing with fire anyway because like it or not they're both adrenaline junkies and they're addicted to the way the things between them hurt. Besides, his aftershave clung to the plastic that rested on the bridge of her nose and she could watch the road disappear under the car and imagine smelling his aftershave all over her own body.

She sleeps in the chair in his living room when he's the one barely clinging to the edge of the cliff. When it's her, he pretends like he sleeps on the couch in her living room but she knows he stands guard outside her bedroom door leaning against the wall. It's just one of those other things they do that they pretend means something else. But it's the wrong kind of metaphor. Because they're sleeping with each other or _not_ sleeping with each other without ever actually _sleeping _with each other and it's not even about the sex they're not having. Not anymore.

She long ago stopped looking for the quick-to-rise erection and has gotten used to dampness in her panties because those things are like shock in her veins but what she really wants from him is more of that moment when he tossed an Indian lighter into the center console of her car because he goddamn _knows_ her.

If she starts cornering him into situations that make him prove how well he knows her, it's more tactical than accidental.

At a bar with the team she asks Daniel for her usual and when he comes back with a white wine - something she drinks, sure, but not her usual _drink_ \- the colonel rolls his eyes and flags a waitress down asking for a couple shots of Jameson and two bottles of Murphy's.

After a particularly poor meeting with a mud puddle off world she stalks back to the fire and plops down next to him. He's got his extra long-sleeved black t-shirt in his lap and hands it to her without a glance. She shivers and pulls it over her head.

After a particularly bad couple of weeks during which both he and Daniel had been fairly badly injured he calls her up at home with some trumped up problem inside the mountain that needs her attention and forces her to get dressed and shake off her funk.

Another night, another bar. It's been eighteen hours since her last meal and she's famished. She examines the hamburger the waiter just dropped off. She sighs, makes to wave down another server but he swaps plates with her. He doesn't like mayonnaise either but he can at least choke it down.

The gate blinks out with Daniel, Teal'c and the colonel on the right side of the horizon and her on the wrong. Sixteen hours later when she finally gets the gate to connect and she pulls herself weary and bedraggled across the event horizon and onto the SGC's ramp, he shoots her with a steely gaze. Later, after her shower, she finds him standing in the dark in her lab and she sees the fire and the worry in the flash of his eyes even as he rails against her - _I'm the last one through the gate, Carter. Every. Damn. Time. You got that?_ Then she's crushed against his chest before the fear even makes it to her freshly-applied mascara.

Somewhere along the way in the weeks between the road trip, that seems to have obliterated any sign of the barriers they'd tried to keep between them, and the here and now, they start to take liberties. Off world they sit up for half a night. She can't say anything with any substance, though, because he's nudging her knee with his knuckle and all she can think about is what other sorts of things he could be nudging with that knuckle.

When she flies in to Denver from San Diego she makes sure her plane lands in the middle of the night so Daniel won't want to pick her up and so that, when Jack agrees, she can tell herself they'll be spending the night together because they will - stretched out together along the highway.

There's a little cafe nearly halfway between their places. They never arrange a time. Whoever gets there first sits unassumingly at the bar reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. That way, they can say, with some degree of honesty, that they really do just have breakfast together when they run into one another.

One day, in his backyard after a barbecue, she throws caution to the wind and hugs him goodbye. She aims a kiss at his cheek and ends up with the corner of his mouth. He licks her sticky lip-gloss off his skin and she spends the next three weeks attempting to catch glimpses of his tongue. _He_ spends the next three weeks tormenting her with those glimpses.

After a particularly harrowing mission they fight about something stupid like the movie she chose for team night and, standing in his foyer with chests heaving, he tells her he's going to kiss her. He restrains himself as he presses hard against her. His kiss is anger and frustration and nothing more than an interdigitation of their lips. She slips him the tongue and he groans so hard her teeth vibrate.

After that he keeps his distance and she thinks it has something to do with keeping his sanity because every time she so much as catches the scent of his deodorant she remembers the way it felt to flick the tip of her tongue against his and she finds every little interaction with him that isn't him sliding something of his inside something of hers is absolutely excruciating.

They replace stolen moments with more late night phone calls and even though she knows _he _knows what she gets up to some nights, she's quiet about it and holds to phone away from the harsh exhalations of her mouth. He isn't as considerate. He groans her name and her eyes well up with tears even as her body responds.

And that's the thing that makes her keep _her _distance. Team nights don't happen. Drinks don't happen. Breakfast and visits to her lab don't happen. _They_ don't happen. But she catches his eye sometimes and feels like she's going to ignite. He watches her, all the time, and because he does she walks around in a constant state of irritated arousal. He calls her sometimes but she lets him go to voicemail. She checks for messages right away, just in case it's important, but it never is. Not when the phone rings at eleven o'clock. Anyway, if it was the world ending, experience tells her it was going to happen in the middle of the night.

Somehow they learn how to navigate the minefield between them. They still don't spend time alone together and now when she comes with him in her mind it's not with him on the other end of the phone.

Then one day he gets a phone call and is on a plane before the end of the day. He doesn't make it back to the Springs before nightfall and he doesn't answer his cell. At two a.m. she's still awake and the little envelope icon on her laptop starts to flash. She opens the message when she sees it's from him. There's no text, just an attachment of a map.

This time Belize.


End file.
